Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Compared to the estimated number of internet users wordwide (5.4 billion) the number of ad block users is estimated to be around 912 million (year 2023). That is roughly 17% of all internet users worldwide.
That means that around 83% of all internet users worldwide do not use an ad blocker at all.
We should be very worried if the finances are so bad they are now going after the 17% (the numbers are prob a bit more skewed as I assume a higher % of that 17 is a high volume user)
I too believe that the percentage of high volume users is higher. The graph shows the ammount of users that access the internet regardless of the device. I assume that about 2/3 of those users access the internet with a smartphone exclusively, implying that these users don't use an ad blocker at all, since the word hasn't spread to an extend that everyone uses one.
The remaining third of all users access the internet with a browser on a desktop computer. It is very hard to estimate who uses ad blockers, as I can't find any reliable resources. It depends on the peer group one is a part of. When I look into my social group, only three out of ten users do have an adblocker installed (me included) - and for two of those I had them introduced to ad blockers and set it up for them.
On the other hand: I assume that the combination of Firefox and UBlock Origin would apply to 90% of Fediverse / Lemmy users.
Oh look, YouTube managed to circumvent uBlock for like two hours again before someone figured out a fix, lol.
Seriously, I wanna know how much funds Google allocates to fight ad blockers just to come up with a working solution every odd month that then gets fixed by the uBlock community in hours. There’s no way this is profitable for them or gets a sizable number of uBlock users to buy their subscription.
Seriously, I wanna know how much funds Google allocates to fight ad blockers just to come up with a working solution every odd month that then gets fixed by the uBlock community in hours.
To me the most baffling part is the devs. Like, someone has to be working on this? An honest-to-god software engineer is spending their life fighting windmills to harras more people with ads. This cannot be fulfilling work in any way, can it? Great, I'm putting a lot of work into circumventing uBlock and
To be fine with that you have to be either a sociopath, or somehow completely compertmantilise the task and actively not think about the externalities... or be held at gunpoint. I mean, you're a fucking software developer, there are other jobs than Google! You could be doing literally anything else right now, up to and including herding goats, why the fuck would you willingly fight on the front of the Ad War on the side of the ads.
If I was working on YouTube and my boss told me that I had to figure out a way to thwart uBlock I'd just tell him no. If the choice was between doing that and quitting, I'd quit the same fucking day and get a job doing something real. I quite literally cannot imagine why you wouldn't do that, you got a job at GOOGLE, if you succeeded in their stupid recruitment process then you can find a job LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE the same fucking week you quit.
I've seen what effort goes into it at somewhere else, it's a lot
not sure I'd say it's unprofitable though, given just how goddamn much money google does make from its advertising monopoly. but I get what you meant with the conversion angle nonetheless
Please don't make posts to TechTakes that are just bare images without a description. The description can be simple, like "Screenshot from YouTube saying 'Ad blockers violate YouTube's Terms of Service'". Some of our participants rely upon screenreaders. Or are crotchety old people who remember an Internet that wasn't all three websites sharing snapshots of the other two websites.
i use ublock origin
reddit still good for something: Filter Lists-->uBlock filters-->uncheck the "ublock filters - quickfixes" box and then reload the page.
this worked for me
Did this disable ad blocking or just tell the notice to fuck off?
ad blocking works fine with this unchecked. from what i gather this particular switch is a recent addition per the ublock app update, which broke youtube ad blocking. i'm sure ublock will rectify it, but in the meantime this workaround works around it.
Thanks for the heads up!
We, the violators!
No problem, set your useragent to openai, boom no more advertisements. Every other video is some weird video about how great google is however. Strange that. (Note: this is a joke, not something that I tested and actually works).
If the Youtube player is giving you trouble, check out this Android App (alternative FDroid Repo) or the tool it's based on (GitHub).
I need to finally figure out which client’s most stable for Kodi, cause even though I’m freeloading on a friend’s YouTube platinum account, the official TV app’s still an incredibly unpleasant experience even without ads
SmartTV is still a missing link for me too. A Kodi RaspberryPi hooked up via HDMI seems viable.
I wish I could just flash the firmware with a Linux and reinstall the Apps I need, but the whole ecosystem seems way too intransparent, and I'm not a passionate hardware hacker.
TL;DW - They do whatever Aaron tells them to.
what
The video is titled, "How the Jets Trade for players."
still don’t get it